One of the biggest comic events of my childhood is coming to the silver screen and I’m filled with indifference.

If you grew up with Marvel Comics in the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps the most mind-blowing storyline was Days of Future Past in The Uncanny X-Men. A full-length trailer for the movie of the same name has been circulating online ahead of the motion picture’s May 23 release.

Being an X-Men fan from way back, I’m the sort of nostalgic moviegoer this film is aimed at. As kids, it was the kind of movie we dreamed about. I should be pumped. And yet my dominant emotion is . . . meh.

It’s hard now to describe how excited my friends and I were about those two issues of our favourite Marvel title. Taking place in a dystopian future, it was published at a time when seeing the world in ruins was still a fresh idea. And unlike the movie version, which centres on Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, the hero of the piece was Kitty Pryde — the mutant played by Halifax’s Ellen Page in the big-screen X-Men adaptations.

As drawn by Canadian artist John Byrne, Pryde was many a teenage boy’s first crush. Since Marvel has so much invested in Wolverine now, both on the page and the silver screen, she is now a minor character.

Part of the mystique of Days of Future Past was so much was hinted at. There was a red-headed telepath character in the future named Rachel — was she the offspring of Jean Grey and Scott Summers? We didn’t know. And when the X-Men were killed by giant robots, their deaths happened mostly off-screen — not because of Comics Code Authority censorship, but leaving it to the imagination was more dramatic.

I’m not saying things were better when I was a kid. Art in the average Marvel book is way more advanced than 35 years ago. But you can only have the perspective of a child once, and the X-Men movies — like last year’s craptastic The Wolverine — have been uniformly underwhelming. So count me out.